J. Peder Zane’s column this morning on the politics of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity — its ending as well as its beginning — included the following:
The poverty center has always been a political animal, with tiger claws and donkey brains. It was created in 2005 to bolster the candidacy of former Democratic Sen. John Edwards, who made poverty a centerpiece of his failed White House bid in 2008. Imagine the uproar from the left if a GOP-dominated board helped Sen. Thom Tillis or, better yet, Art Pope build a Center for Freedom with UNC’s imprimatur.
One does not need just to imagine the uproar. Only need only remember the uproar when the Pope Foundation was in negotiations with UNC-Chapel Hill
to provide several years of renewable support (somewhere in the range of $600,000 to $1 million a year) to create a new minor in Western civilization, and to promote the study of the subject in other ways, such as financing travel by students to study the classics in Greece and Italy. If all goes well, the foundation might then provide an endowment — possibly worth more than $10 million — to cover the costs of the program permanently.
These negotiations took place before, during, and after the “Edwards Center” was hastily assembled in secrecy and with little if any faculty notification. Nevertheless, when over 70 members of the faculty wrote an open letter to condemn the secrecy, lack of transparency, lack of faculty notification and input, use of grant money, and political speech regarding a proposed addition to the campus, they were talking about the one that would have resulted in new classes, academic offerings, and even potential study abroad for its students. They were definitely not writing about the campaign vehicle.
Their apparent uncconcern about those issues with respect to the poverty center was so glaring that it lent itself to a satiric rewriting of their original letter just to underscore its inherent hypocrisy.
Speaking of hypocrisy, media and UNC supporters trying to discover free speech problems over the loss of the poverty center are embarrassing themselves. It is not just that, as Zane pointed out,
Board members knew their actions were toothless. They knew Nichol would continue to be a tenured professor at the UNC law school, ensuring his academic freedom. They knew he would continue to write for The N&O, which provides a platform for his unfettered free speech.
It is also that they were in agreement that it was right to block the Western Civ academic program on the very basis of the speech and viewpoints expressed by some other recipients of Pope Foundation grants. The aforementioned letter listed that concern as one of three “serious issues” with the proposal.
University protests delineated several examples of such offensive speech, against which our ad hoc free speech advocates of today raised nary a concern. The picture above is from one such protest. The entirety of its objection is viewpoint-based, even if the sign-writer larded it with ridiculous question-begging, as if ashamed to waive about an honest objection to free-market liberalism. Nevertheless, its sentiment was welcomed, not deplored, by today’s supposed speech stalwarts.
If one wished to find questions in media about the propriety of keeping academic opportunities from young scholars on the transitive basis of counterculture speech, well, one had to write it himself.
